… Let these dreams collide, as well as all those other childhood antidotes and poisons. Allow each its own freeze frame,

but see

how they are all recorded against the same backdrop, so, like an early animation, the light thumb of dreams may flick through the pages creating a seamless movie.

In these lines, taken from ‘The African Spider Cures’, Judy Johnson might almost be describing her poetics. Nomadic, Johnson’s second poetry collection, consists of well-made poems that combine objective views of the world with snippets from the poet’s personal life. In the title poem, which centres around a recent separation, Johnson compares her experience of finding an illicit love letter with a Bedouin shepherd-boy’s chance discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls: ‘There is no connection between the two events,’ she writes, ‘[…] Yet I encounter coincidence.’